After an initial shock, U.S. universities are learning to live with file swapping among students on campus, despite legal risks and the heavy demands such activities place on computer networks.
When Napster burst onto the Net about two years ago, some campus network administrators blocked the software to avoid lawsuits and conserve resources. Now the legal threats to universities have receded and many of the technical problems that once plagued networks are being solved, giving network administrators more options when setting peer-to-peer usage policies, some college officials say.
"Students are essentially our customers, and we need to try to make them happy," said Russell Taylor, director of academic computing and information systems at Lees-McRae College, in Banner Elk, N.C. "Music and movies are out there to download, so rather than take a hard-and-fast line to block it...we decided it would be best to let it continue, but to limit it down until such a time it does become illegal."
Tolerance of file swapping on campus is partly attributed to the emergence of efficient management tools for network traffic, which could conceivably be used to harshly limit the practice. Companies such as Packeteer and NetReality have been marketing such products to schools for months and claim hundreds of clients.
NetReality this week said that it's latest version of WiseWan will include a new peer-to-peer engine, enabling network managers to quickly identify new bandwidth-hogging applications and apply policies to control usage. For instance, a network manager using WiseWan could automatically see when people tap into file-swapping services such as Morpheus and Gnutella and discover how much bandwidth each person is consuming. The upgrade will also help network mangers identify and monitor HTTP-Tunnel, a technique that hides peer-to-peer traffic by making it resemble regular Internet traffic, enabling it to slip past firewalls.
Universities are learning to use these new tools to inform users that they are indeed monitoring bandwidth usage. Thomas Board, director of technology support services at Northwestern said that peer-to-peer applications are still used within the campus network without restriction. However, the university has set up a Web site to inform people what the bandwidth management system is doing and the rules it has set for students. For instance, on the weekdays between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., the university gives 25 percent of available bandwidth to high-demand applications, such as peer-to-peer networks. During the evenings and weekends, that jumps to 50 percent of available bandwidth.
And at another college, Lees-McRae, they recently installed NetReality's technology, allocating only one third of its T1 line--about 500 kilobytes--to music and film downloads. Although students complained that the technology causes slower download times for file-swapping applications, school officials say they are essentially regulating the traffic, not stopping students from using those applications entirely.
Howard King, the attorney who represented Metallica and Dr. Dre in a complaint against three universities, said schools shut down Napster for three reasons -- part legal, part moral and part technical. But he added that banning peer-to-peer technology on campus is likely too harsh a remedy.
"Not all peer-to-peer networks or peer-to-peer technology are illegal or bad," King said. "I'm sure there are substantial positive uses of these networks."
News source: CNet News
When Napster burst onto the Net about two years ago, some campus network administrators blocked the software to avoid lawsuits and conserve resources. Now the legal threats to universities have receded and many of the technical problems that once plagued networks are being solved, giving network administrators more options when setting peer-to-peer usage policies, some college officials say.
"Students are essentially our customers, and we need to try to make them happy," said Russell Taylor, director of academic computing and information systems at Lees-McRae College, in Banner Elk, N.C. "Music and movies are out there to download, so rather than take a hard-and-fast line to block it...we decided it would be best to let it continue, but to limit it down until such a time it does become illegal."
Tolerance of file swapping on campus is partly attributed to the emergence of efficient management tools for network traffic, which could conceivably be used to harshly limit the practice. Companies such as Packeteer and NetReality have been marketing such products to schools for months and claim hundreds of clients.
NetReality this week said that it's latest version of WiseWan will include a new peer-to-peer engine, enabling network managers to quickly identify new bandwidth-hogging applications and apply policies to control usage. For instance, a network manager using WiseWan could automatically see when people tap into file-swapping services such as Morpheus and Gnutella and discover how much bandwidth each person is consuming. The upgrade will also help network mangers identify and monitor HTTP-Tunnel, a technique that hides peer-to-peer traffic by making it resemble regular Internet traffic, enabling it to slip past firewalls.
Universities are learning to use these new tools to inform users that they are indeed monitoring bandwidth usage. Thomas Board, director of technology support services at Northwestern said that peer-to-peer applications are still used within the campus network without restriction. However, the university has set up a Web site to inform people what the bandwidth management system is doing and the rules it has set for students. For instance, on the weekdays between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., the university gives 25 percent of available bandwidth to high-demand applications, such as peer-to-peer networks. During the evenings and weekends, that jumps to 50 percent of available bandwidth.
And at another college, Lees-McRae, they recently installed NetReality's technology, allocating only one third of its T1 line--about 500 kilobytes--to music and film downloads. Although students complained that the technology causes slower download times for file-swapping applications, school officials say they are essentially regulating the traffic, not stopping students from using those applications entirely.
Howard King, the attorney who represented Metallica and Dr. Dre in a complaint against three universities, said schools shut down Napster for three reasons -- part legal, part moral and part technical. But he added that banning peer-to-peer technology on campus is likely too harsh a remedy.
"Not all peer-to-peer networks or peer-to-peer technology are illegal or bad," King said. "I'm sure there are substantial positive uses of these networks."
News source: CNet News
Lead researcher Dr. Mijail Serruya and his colleagues at Brown tested the device by having a monkey play a simple video game, in which the animal used the cursor to chase a moving target on a computer screen.
The monkey was able to move the cursor ``instantly'' with as much control as if it were using a computer mouse or a joystick, Serruya said. The monkey wills the cursor to move. The cursor moves.
The animals' hands-free cursor control was almost as fast and accurate as when they used their hands, the researchers reported. So far, three monkeys have received the implant.
Linked to a personal computer, the cursor-control device ``would work for anything you can do or you can imagine doing by pointing and clicking. This includes reading e-mail,'' Donoghue said. ``Or imagine an on-screen keyboard that someone can use to type sentences or issue commands by pointing and clicking.''
The Brown implant system uses an array of 100 tiny electrodes to detect electrical activity from a pinprick of neurons -- between seven and 30 motor cortex cells -- and feed it through a cable to a personal computer.
There, a formula the Brown group designed turns the brain activity into instructions a computer can use to plot the cursor movements. That software interpreter uses a fairly straightforward application of textbook algebra, the scientists said.
The system is so small and draws so little power that any future device developed for human use could easily be made wireless, said biomedical engineer Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.
It may be a decade or more before any clinical product is ready for testing, however. So little is known about tapping the neural activity of the human brain that researchers are likely to proceed slowly. No one knows, for example, what the effect would be of having such an electrode in the brain for years or whether over time the implant might lose its ability to function. ``This implant is potentially one that is very suitable for humans,'' Serruya said. ``It shows enough promise that we think it could ultimately be hooked up via a computer to a paralyzed patient. ``We want to be careful that the implant is suitable and safe,'' said Serruya. ``There are a few technical details that we are still working on.'' The Brown researchers have filed for a patent on the technique and formed a company called Cyberkinetics to develop medical applications.
Other research groups in recent years have announced encouraging successes in experiments with devices designed to turn brain commands into computer instructions. Until now, these were limited in their potential usefulness by technical constraints.
What makes the newest effort to link brain and machine remarkable is the ease with which it can be learned and the small number of neurons it requires to operate, Mussa-Ivaldi said.
"There are a mountain of things we still need to know," he said. "But this is progress."
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